Side project hosting

A hobby project should cost hobby money.

An idea on a Saturday that should be on a real URL by Sunday evening. It might become something. It probably won't. Both outcomes are fine, and the hosting shouldn't punish either.

# From repo to URL in an evening

What a hack needs on day one is small: PHP, a database, and an address. Each new app starts as a free trial — seven days, no credit card — and answers on a test domain with TLS already in place, so there is no domain to buy and no certificate to wire up before anyone can look at it.

Connect the GitHub repo and push; the deploy service runs Composer and the app is live. Software templates pre-configure the build settings per framework, so the first push works without tuning anything first.

# Kill it or grow it

Plenty of these go nowhere, and the platform is built for that. A trial app with no payment method deletes itself when the week ends, and a paid app stops billing the day it's deleted — nothing survives except the Git repo. No subscription quietly running in the background, no server to remember to cancel.

The few that grow scale a component at a time, on the same host, without a migration. That asymmetry is the point: the downside is cheap and the upside doesn't require moving.

# Why fortrabbit?

Because this is where fortrabbit came from. Hosting ran for years as a side gig next to agency work, on servers we bought ourselves, long before it was a company — nobody here needs convincing that most weekend ideas die and the odd one changes everything. Push to deploy on a free trial, share the link on Sunday, and delete it on Monday for the price of a weekend. When it doesn't die, it stays where it is and grows a component at a time.